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The many forms of idealism

Sometimes it is difficult to identify idealists, because they wear such pessimistic clothing that all we can see are the patterns of a sardonic nature, or of irony. On the other hand, many who speak most glowingly, in the most idealistic fashions, underneath are filled with the darkest aspects of pessimism and despair. If we are idealists, and if we feel relatively powerless in the world at the same time, and if our idealism is general and grandiose, unrelated to any practical plans for its expression, then we can find ourselves in difficulties indeed. Here are a few specific examples of what I mean.

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One man from another part of the country, begins to speak about the state of the nation, largely condemning all of his countrymen and countrywomen for their greed and stupidity. People would do anything at all for money, he/she said. He/she expresses his opinion that the species itself would almost inevitably bring about its own destruction.

He/she cites many instances of nefarious acts committed for money’s sake. A lively discussion results, but no countering opinion could enter this man’s mind or woman’s. Paul, let us call him, is an idealist at heart, but he believes that the individual has little power in the world, and so he did not pursue his personal idealism in the events of his own life. “Everyone is a slave to the system.” That is his line of belief. He took a routine job in a local business and stayed with it for over 20 years, all of the time hating to go to work, or saying that he did, and at the same time refusing to try other areas of activity that were open to him — because he was afraid to try.

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He feels he has betrayed himself, and he projects that betrayal outward until betrayal is all that he sees in the social-political world. Had he begun the work of actualizing his ideals through his own private life, he would not be in such a situation. The expression of ideals brings about satisfaction, which then of course promotes the further expression of practical idealism.

Paul speaks the same way in any social group, and therefore to extent spreads a negative and despairing aura. I do not want to define his existence by those attitudes alone, however, for when he forgets the great gulf between his idealism and practical life, and speaks about other activities, then he is full of charming energy. That energy could have sustained him far more than it has, however, had he counted on his natural interests and chosen one of those for his life’s work. He could have been an excellent teacher. He had offers of other jobs that would have pleased him more, but he is so convinced of his lack of power that he did not dare take advantage of the opportunities. There are satisfactions in his life that prevent him from narrowing his focus even further.

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If we want to change the world for the better, then we are an idealist. If we want to change the world for the better, but we believe it cannot be changed one whit, then we are a pessimist, and our idealism will only haunt us. If we want to change the world for the better, but we believe that it will grow worse, despite everyone’s efforts, then we are a truly despondent, perhaps misguided idealist. If we want to change the world for the better, and if we are determined to do so, no matter at what cost to oneself or others, no matter what the risk, and if we believe that those ends justify any means at our disposal, then we are a fanatic.

Fanatics are inverted idealists. Usually they are vague grandiose dreamers, whose plans almost completely ignore the full dimensions of normal living. They are unfulfilled idealists who are not content to express idealism in steps, one at a time, or indeed to wait for the practical workings of active expression. They demand immediate action. They want to make the world over in their own images. They cannot bear the expression of tolerance or opposing ideas. They are the most self-righteous of the self-righteous, and they will sacrifice almost anything — their own lives or the lives of others. They will justify almost any crime for the pursuit of those ends.

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Another example: Two young women. They are exuberant, energetic, and filled with youthful idealism. They want to change the world. Working with the Ouija board, they received messages telling them that they could indeed have a part in a great mission. One young lady wants to quit her job, stay at home, and immerse herself in “psychic work,” hoping that her part in changing the world could be accomplished in that manner. The other is an office worker.

There is nothing more stimulating, more worthy of actualization, than the desire to change the world for the better. That is indeed each person’s mission. We begin by working in that area of activity that is our own unique one, with our own life and activities. We begin in the corner of an office, or on the assembly line, or in the advertising agency, or in the kitchen. We begin where we are.

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If Paul, mentioned earlier, had begun where he was, he would be a different, happier, more fulfilled person today. And to some extent or other, his effect on all the other people he has met would have been far more beneficial.

When we fulfill our own abilities, when we express our personal idealism through acting it out to the best of our ability in our daily life, then we are changing the world for the better.

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My friend Sophia has abilities , and she is banking on them, developing them in a practical way. She believes that she forms her own reality. She quenched doubts that she was not good enough to succeed, or that it was too difficult to get ahead in the fitness business. The satisfaction of performance leads her to more expansive creativity, and to her natural sense of personal power. Through developing those abilities personally, she will contribute to the enjoyment of others. She is an idealist. She will try to bring a greater sense of values to the fitness/health industry, for example, and she is willing to do the work necessary.

Youth is full of strength, however, so she find a way to give her own abilities greater expression, and hence to increase her own sense of power. Though sometimes she is dealing with dark periods of despair.

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Idealism also presupposes “the good” as opposed to “the bad,” so how can the pursuit of “the good” often lead to the expression of “the bad?” For that we will have to look further.

There is one commandment above all, in practical terms — a Christian commandment that can be used as a yardstick. It is good because it is something we can understand practically: “Thou shalt not kill.” That is clear enough. Under most conditions we know when we have killed. That Commandment is a much better road to follow, for example than: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” for many of us do not love ourselves to begin with, and can scarcely love our neighbor as well. The idea is that is we love our neighbor we will not treat him/her poorly, much less kill him/her — but the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill,” says we shall not kill our neighbor no matter how we feel about him/her. So let us say in a new commandment: “Thou shalt not kill even in the pursuit of our ideals.”

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What does that mean? In practical terms it would mean that we would not wage war for the sake of peace. It would mean that we did not kill animals in experiments, taking their lives in order to protect the sacredness of human life. That would be a prime directive: “Thou shalt not kill even in the pursuit of our ideals” — for man and woman has killed for the sake of his/her ideals as much as he/she ever killed for greed, or lust, or even the pursuit of power on its own merits.

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We are a fanatic of we consider possible killing for the pursuit of our ideal. For example, our ideal may be — for ideals differ — the production of endless energy for the uses of mankind and womankind, and we may believe so fervently in that ideal — this added convenience to life — that we considered the hypothetical possibility of that convenience being achieved at the risk of losing some lives along the way, that is fanaticism.

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It means that we are not willing to take the actual steps in physical reality to achieve the ideal, but that we believe that the end justifies the means: “Certainly some lives may be lost along the way, but overall, mankind and womankind will benefit.” That is the usual argument. The sacredness of life cannot be sacrificed for life’s convenience, or the quality of life itself will suffer. In the same manner, say, the ideal is to protect human life, and in the pursuit of that ideal we give generations of various animals deadly diseases, and sacrifice their lives. Our justification may be that people have souls and animals do not, or that the quality of life is less in the animals, but regardless of those arguments this is fanaticism — and the quality of human life itself suffers as a result, for those who sacrifice any kind of life along the way lose some respect for all life, human life included. The ends do not justify the means.

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The American experiment with democracy is heroic, bold, and innovative

In historic terms as we understand them, this is the first time that all of the inhabitants of a country were to be legally considered equal citizens one with the other. That was to be, and is, the ideal. In practical terms, of course, there often are inequalities. Treatment in the marketplace, or in society, often shows great divergence from that stated national ideal. Yet the dream is a vital portion of American national life, and even those who are unscrupulous must pay it at least lip service, or cast their plans in its light.

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In the past, and in large areas of the world now, many important decisions are not made by the individual, but by the state, or religion, or society. In this century several issues came to the forefront of American culture: The exteriorization of organized religion, which became more of a social rather than a spiritual entity, and joining of science with technology and moneyed interests. William James’ books would be good background material here, particularly the sections dealing with democracy and spiritualism. In any case, on the one hand each individual was to be equal with each other person. Marriages, for example, were no longer arranged. A man no longer need follow his father’s vocational footsteps. Young adults found themselves faced with a multitudinous number of personal decisions that in other cultures were made more or less automatically. The development of transportation opened up the country, so that an individual was no longer bound to his or her native town or region. All of this meant that man’s and woman’s conscious mind was about to expand its strengths, its abilities, and its reach. The country was — and still is — brimming with idealism.

That idealism, however, ran smack into the dark clouds of Freudian and Darwinian thought. How could a country be governed effectively by individuals who were after all chemicals run amok in images, with neuroticism built-in from childhood — children of a tainted species, thrown adrift by a meaningless cosmos in which no meaning could be found?

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Organized religion felt threatened; and if it could not prove that man/woman had a soul, it could at least see to it that the needs of the body were taken care of through suitable social work, and so it abandoned many of the principles that might have added to its strength. Instead it settled for platitudes that equated cleanliness with virtue — hence, or course, our deodorant advertisements, and many other aspects of the marketplace.

In public mind, it made little difference whether the devil or tainted genes condemned the individual to a life in which it seemed he/she could have little control. He or she began to feel powerless. He/she began to feel that social action itself was of little value, for if man’s or woman’s evil were built-in, for whatever reasons, then where was there any hope?

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There was some hope, at least, in looking for better living conditions personally. There was some hope in forgetting one’s doubts in whatever exterior distractions could be found. Idealism is tough, and it is enduring, and no matter how many times its is seemingly slain, it comes back in a different form. So those who felt that religion had failed them looked anew to science, which promised — promised to — provide the closest approximation to heaven on earth: Mass production of goods, two cars in every garage, potions for every ailment, solutions for every problem. And it seems in the beginning that science delivered, for the world was changed from candlelight to electric light to neon in the flicker of an eye, and man and woman could travel in hours distances that to his father or grandfather took days on end.

And while science provided newer and newer comforts and conveniences, few questions were asked. There was, however, no doubt about it: Exterior conditions had improved, yet the individual did not seem any happier. By this time it was apparent that the discoveries of science could also have a darker side. Life’s exterior conveniences would hardly matter if science’s knowledge was used to undermine the very foundations of life itself.

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The various potions taken faithfully by the public were now often found to have very unfortunate side effects. The chemicals used to protect agriculture had harmful effects upon people. Such situations bothered the individual far more than the threat of nuclear disaster, for they involved his contact with daily life: The products that he/she bought, the medicines that he/she took.

Some people looked, and are looking, for some authority — any authority — to make their decisions for them, for the world seems increasingly dangerous, and they, because of their beliefs, feel increasingly powerless. They yearn toward old ways, when the decisions of marriage were made for them, when they could safely follow in their father’s or mother’s footsteps, when they were unaware of the lure of different places, and forced to remain at home. They have become caught between science and religion. Their idealism finds no particular outlet. Their dreams seem betrayed.

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Those people look to cults of various kinds, where decisions are made for them, where they are relieved of the burden of an individuality that has been robbed of its sense of power by conflicting beliefs. At one time the males might have been drafted into the army, and, secretly exultant, gone looking for the period before full adulthood — where decisions would be made for them, where they could mark time, and where those who were not fully committed to life could leave it with a sense of honor and dignity.

In the past also, even in our country, there were convents and monasteries for those who did not want to live in the world as other people did. They might pursue other goals, but the decisions of where to live, what to do, where to go, how to live, would be made for them. Usually such people were joined by common interests, a sense of honor, and there was no retaliation to be feared in this century.

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Cults, however, deal primarily with fear, using it as a stimulus. They further erode the power of the individual, so that he is frightened to leave. The group has power. The individual has none, except that the power of the group is vested in its leader. Those who died in Guyana, for example, were suicidal inclined. They had no cause to live for, because their idealism became so separated from any particular actualization that they were left only with its ashes.

The leader of Jonestown was at heart an idealist. When does an idealist turn into a fanatic? When can the search for the good have catastrophic results, and how can the idealism of science be equated with the near-disaster at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, and with the potential disasters that in our terms exist in the storage of nuclear wastes, or in the production of nuclear bombs?

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People who live in tornado country carry the reality of a tornado in their minds and hearts as a psychological background.

To one extent or another, all of the vents of their lives happen punctuated or accented by the possibility of disaster. They feel that at any time they might be caused to face the greatest challenge, to rely upon their strongest resources, their greatest forbearance, and faced by a test of endurance. They use — or they often use — such a psychological and physical backdrop to keep those qualities alive within themselves, for they are the kind of people who like to feel pitted against a challenge. Often the existence of probabilities and their acceptance does provide a kind of exterior crisis situation that individually and en masse is a symbol of independence and inner crisis. The crisis is met in the exterior situation, and as the people deal with that situation they symbolically deal with their own inner crises. In a way those people trust such exterior confrontations, and even count upon a series of them, of varying degrees of severity, that can be used throughout a lifetime for such purposes.

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Those who survive feel that they have been given a new lease on life, regardless of their circumstances: They could have been killed and were not. Others use the same circumstances as excuses for no longer hanging on to a wish for life, and so it seems that while saving face they fall prey to the exterior circumstances.

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Human deals with a kind of dual selfhood

In that Human presently thinks of Human as an uneasy blend of body and mind. Human identifies primarily with what I call a limited portion of Human consciousness. That portion human equates with mind or intelligence. Human identifies with events over which he/she is aware of having some control.

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Human thinks of acts, for example, and acting and doing, but he does not identify Human with these inner processes that make acting and doing possible. Human identifies with what he/she thinks of as Human logical thought, and the abilities of reasoning. These seem to suggest that Human possesses and elegant, cool separation from nature, that the animals for example do not. Human does not identify, with the processes that make Human logical thinking possible. Those processes are spontaneous and ‘unconscious,’ so it appears that anything outside of Human conscious control must be undisciplined or chaotic, and lacking in all logic.

Both religion and science are based upon such beliefs. Anything that happens spontaneously is looked upon with suspicion. The word seems to suggest elements out of control, or motion that goes from one extreme to another. Only the reasoning mind, it seems, has any idea of order, discipline, or control.

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Human is therefore set against Human nature in Human’s own mind, and Human thinks Human must control it. The fact is that man’s and woman’s consciousness can indeed become aware of — aware of — those spontaneous processes. But he/she oneself has largely closed the door of comprehension, so that he only identifies with what he/she thinks of as his/her rational mind, and tries to forget as best he/she can those spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly

Human has often become frightened of Human’s own creativity, then, since he or her has not trusted its source.

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Scientists have become somewhat contemptuous of the non-elite

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Contemptuous of all who are not scientists, and they build up a false sense of comparative omnipotence in response — and that makes them less careful than they should be. They feel misunderstood by the public.

None of them want any disaster, and yet some of them think it would serve the people right — for then the people might realize that politicians do not understand science, and that the scientists should after all be put in control: “We must have enough money, or who knows what can go wrong?”

The scientific elite could of course present a probability in which a world was created [where] the common man could have little knowledge of its workings. We actually have an excellent set of guards and balances in our country. Now our TV dramas, systematically show our Frankenstein movies just when our scientists are contemplating all kinds of experiments supposed to bring forth life. Hardly a coincidence, for the mass minds of the people are bale to make certain joint statements, and those statements are heard.

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Everything in nature is intentional and useful

Everything in nature is intentional; therefore dreams must fulfill important roles in people’s lives — but how, in ordinary terms?

Even if we don’t consciously remember our dreams, we do get the message. Part of it will appear in our daily experience in one way or another — in our conversation or daily events.

Because dreams are such a perfect combination of stimuli from the inner environment and the exterior environment, other events are often used to trigger inner dream messages, just as the opposite occurs. And in a gathering of three people watching the same TV drama, say, each of them might be interpreting different portions of the program so that those portions correlate with their individual dreams of the night before, and serve to bring them their dream messages in ways they can accept.

Great discrimination is used to do that; for example, one newspaper item is noticed over others because a certain portion of that item represents some of the dream’s message. Another portion might come from a neighbor — but from the dreamer’s interpretation of the neighbor’s remarks, that further brings home the dream message. In such cases the individual will scarcely be aware that a dream is involved.

We might dream of going away on a long trip by car, only to find that a tire blew when we were driving too fast. We may never remember the dream. One way or another, however, we will hit upon some kind of situation — a portion of a TV drama, perhaps — in which a tire is blown. Or we will see an item of that nature in the internet, or we will hear a story, told directly or indirectly about the same kind of dilemma. The magnitude of the physical stimuli with which we are surrounded makes it possible, of course, for any given day. Even then, we might not recall the dream, but the situation itself as it comes to our attention might make us check our tires, decide to put off our trip, or instead lead us to inner speculation about whether we are going too fast in a certain direction for our own good at this time. But we will get the dream’s message.

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Psychological objects

Objects just originate in man’s and woman’s imagination, there’s always a strong connection between objects and man’s and woman’s dreams. They act as symbols of inner reality, so it’s only natural that whether he/she is aware of it or not, man/woman perceives objects in such a fashion that they also stand for symbols that first originate in his/her dreams.

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This also has to do with large events, that we might for convenience’s sake think of for now as psychological objects — that is, events seen and recognized by large numbers of people in the same way that objects are.

The Christ drama is a case in point, where private and mass dreams were then projected outward into the historical context of time, and then reacted to in such a way that various people became exterior participants — but in a far larger mass dream that was then interpreted in the most literal of physical terms. Even while it was, it also got the message across, though the inner drama itself was not recalled; and as the dream merged with historical events, and it was interpreted by so many, its message also became distorted — or rather, it mixed and merged with other such dreams, whose messages were far different.

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Look at our nuclear-reactor troubles at the plant by Fukushima (Japan). The entire idea of nuclear power was first a dream — an act of the imagination of the part of private individuals — and then through fiction and the arts, a dream on the part of many people. Instantly, probabilities spun out from that dream in all directions, vast potential and dangers.

It was hardly a coincidence that this particular situation arrived in the social climate first of all portrayed in a movie.

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Nuclear power stands for power, plain and simple. Is it good or bad? It stands in man’s and woman’s dreams as belonging to God: the power of the universe. Man and woman has always considered oneself, in our terms as set apart from nature, so he/she must feel set apart from nature’s power — and there must be a great division in his/her dreams between the two. Nuclear energy in fact, then, comes as a dream symbol, and emerges into the world as something to be dealt with.

Fundamentalists think of nuclear power as a force that God might use, say, to destroy the world. That event in Japan means one thing to them. Some of the scientists equate nuclear power with man’s and woman’s great curiosity, and feel that they wrest this great energy from nature, smarter than their fellow men — so they read those events in their own way. The probabilities are still surging, of course, and in private and mass dreams people try out all kinds of endings for that particular story.

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All in all, millions of people are involved, who will be affected of course to one extent or another.

There is a tie-in, and it’s that the Christ drama happened as a result of man’s and woman’s dream, at least, of achieving brotherhood — a quiet, secure sense of consciousness, and a morality that would sustain him/her in the physical world.

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The Christ drama did splash over into historical reality. Man’s and woman’s fears of not achieving brotherhood, or not achieving a secure state of consciousness, or a workable morality, result in his/her dreams of destruction, however they are expressed. And indeed, the present physical event as it exists now at the energy plant Fukushima can easily be likened to — and is — a warning dream to change man’s and woman’s actions.

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The people of Jonestown died of an epidemic of beliefs

The case was startling, because of the obvious suicidal acts. The poison was after all, left as evidence. Had the same number of people been found dead of a vicious disease — aids or whatever– the virus involved would have been the villain.

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We think of viruses as physical, and of thoughts as mental. We should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times we ask why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.

When we think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.

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Our physical body is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version –the physically alive version — of the body of our thoughts. It is not that our thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will use an analogy. It is not the best, but I hope it will get the point across: It is as if our thoughts turned into the various appendages of our body. They have an invisible existence within our body as surely as viruses do. Our body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, X-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Our thoughts are as physically pertinent to our body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers all of the body’s inner responses. When we think thoughts they are conscious. We think in sentences, or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain this, rise from inner components of which we are unaware.

When the thought, is thought, it is, say, broken down again to those components. Our thoughts have an emotional basis, also. The smallest cell within our body contributes to that emotional reality, and reacts instantly to our thoughts.

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In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically, when we have an immunity to a disease we have a mental immunity.

We think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country, to “invade” scores of physical mechanisms. Now thoughts are “contagious.” We have natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with our own purposes and beliefs, and naturally, we are “inoculated” with a wholesome trust and belief in our own thoughts above others. The old ideas of Voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. We cannot divide, say, mental and physical health, nor can we divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.

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While I say all of this about thoughts and viruses, remember the context of the discussion, for new information and insights are always available to an individual from sub-conscious and the body does indeed send its own signals.

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The people who died at Jonestown believed that they must die. They wanted to die. How could their thoughts allow them to bring about their [bodily deaths]? The question makes sense only if we do not realize that our thoughts are as physically a part of our body as viruses are.

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We could not live without viruses

Nor could our biological reality as we know it exist without viruses.

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Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule we think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.

As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladona can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions.

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The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically.

The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual values as a social member is severely weakened.

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In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.

Viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work. People in our time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was tight and accepted, and it only began to fail when societies encountered “civilized views.”

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If we call the demons “negative beliefs,” however, then we have taken strides forward. People continue to die of diseases. Many of our scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he/she dies as a result of his negative beliefs.

What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social and usually spread through person-to-person contact. This is why many people try to limit their exposure to these viruses by wearing things like a surgical-mask,” for example. By wearing face masks, and other things similar, people can reduce their chances of getting the virus and spreading it on to others. Their spread determines their scale of life. This usually varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but we are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”

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We are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.

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Everyhour in every day we get better and better

A suggestion solemnly repeated many times, particularly after the turn of the century. This might sound like a bit of overly optimistic, though maybe delightful, nonsense. To a degree, however, that suggestion worked for millions of people. It was not a cure-all. It did not help those who believed in the basic untrustworthiness of their own natures. The suggestion was far from a bit of fluff, however, for it could serve — and it did — as a framework about which new beliefs could rally.

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We often have in our society the opposite suggestion, however, given quite regularly: “Everyday, in every way, I am growing worse, and so is the world.” We have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies. They are usually masked by the polite clothing of conventional acceptance. Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. The deaths are accepted almost as a matter of course. These are victims of war, without question. It seldom occurs to anyone that these are victims of beliefs — since the guns are quite real, and the bombs and the combat.

The enemy is obvious. His intentions are evil. Wars are basically examples of mass suicide — embarked upon, however, with all of the battle’s paraphernalia, carried out through mass suggestion, and through the nation’s greatest resources, by men who are convinced that the universe is unsafe, that the self cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile. We take it for granted that the species is aggressively combative. We must out-think the enemy nation before we ourselves are destroyed. These paranoiac tendencies are largely hidden beneath man’s nationalistic banners.

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“The end justifies the means.” This is another belief, most damaging. Religious wars always have paranoiac tendencies, for the fanatic always fears conflicting beliefs, and systems that embrace them.

We have occasional epidemics that flare up, with victims left dead. Partially, these are also victims of beliefs, for we believe that we have natural body is the natural prey of viruses and diseases over which we have no personal control, except as it is medically provided. In the medical profession, the overall suggestion that operates is one that emphasizes and exaggerates the body’s vulnerability, and plays down its natural healing abilities. People die when they are ready to die, for reasons that are their own. No person dies without a reason. We are not taught that, however, so people do not recognize their own reasons for dying, and are not taught to recognize their own reasons for living — because we are told the life itself is an accident in a cosmic game of chance.

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Therefore, we cannot trust our own intuitions. We think that our purpose in life must be to be something else, or someone else, than we are. In such a situation many people seek out causes, and hope to merge the purposes of the cause with their own unrecognized one.

There have been many great men and women involved in causes, to which they gave their energies, resources, and support. Those people, however, recognized the importance of their own beings, and added that vitality to causes in which they believed. They did not submerge their individuality, and became more themselves. They extended their horizons, pushed beyond the conventional mental landscapes — driven by zest and vitality, by curiosity and love, and not by fear.

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Many people lose their lives in tragedies. People willingly take their lives at the command of their leaders. No armies stand outside. Those people succumb to an epidemic of beliefs, to an environment [that is] closed mentally and physically. The villains consists of the following ideas that the world is unsafe, and growing deadly; that the species itself is tainted by a deadly intent; that the individual has no power over his or her reality; that society or social conditions exist as things in themselves, and their purposes run directly counter to the fulfillment of the individual; and lastly, that the end justifies the means, and that the action of any kind of god is powerless in the world.

The people who kill themselves are idealists — perfectionists of exaggerated quality, whose very desire for the good was tainted and distorted by those beliefs just mentioned. For those beliefs must gradually shut out perception of good from experience.

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Man/Woman is of good intent. When we see evil everywhere in man’s and woman’s intent — in our own actions and those of others — then we set oneself up against our own existence, and that of our kind. We focus upon the gulf between our ideals and our experience, until the gulf is all that is real. We will not see man’s and woman’s good intent, or we will do so ironically — for in comparison with our ideals, good in the world appears to be so minute as to be a mockery.

To this extent experience becomes closed. Such people are frightened of themselves, and of the nature of their existence. They may be intelligent or stupid, gifted, or mundane, but they are frightened of experiencing themselves as themselves, or of acting according to their own wishes. They help create the dogma or system or cult to which they “fall prey.” They expect their leader to act for them. To a certain extent he/she soaks up their paranoia, until it becomes an unquenchable force in him/her, and he/she is their “victim” as much as his/her followers are his/her “victims.”

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In the Middle East affair, we have “red-blooded Americans” dying on a foreign shore, under a banner of wars, which under certain circumstances have been acceptable. We did not have Americans dying in a bloody revolution, caught among terrorists. We had instead Americans succumbing in a foreign land to some belief that are peculiarly American, and home-grown.

We have American belief that money will solve almost any social problem, that the middle-class way of life is the correct “democratic” one, and that the difficulty between blacks and whites in particular can be erased by applying social bandages, rather than by attacking the basic beliefs behind the problem.

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Many young men and women have come to adulthood in fine ranch houses in good neighborhoods. They would seem to be at the peak of life, the product of the best America has to offer. They never had to work for a living, perhaps. they may have attended colleges — but they are the first to realize that such advantages do not necessarily add to the quality of life, for they are the first to arrive at such an enviable position.

The parents have worked to give their children such advantages, and the parents themselves are sometimes confused by their children’s attitudes. The money and position, however, have often been attained as a result of the belief in man’s and woman’s competitive nature — and that belief itself erodes the very prizes it produces: The fruit is bitter in the mouth. Many of the parents believed, quite simply, that the purpose of life was to make more money. Virtue consisted of the best car, a house, or swimming pool – proof that one could survive in a tooth-and-claw world. People may need money to build a lifestyle and maintain those standards (for instance, house renovation or pool remodeling).

Yes, lifestyle could be a necessity of the current generation, but the children wondered: What about those other feelings that stirred in their consciousness? What about those purposes they sensed? The hearts of some of them were like vacuums, waiting to be filled. They looked for values, but at the same time, they felt that they were themselves sons and daughters of a species tainted, at loose ends, with no clear destinations.

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They tried various religions, and in the light of their opinions of themselves their earlier advantages seemed only to damn them further. They tried social programs, and found a curious sense of belonging with the disadvantaged, for they were also rootless. The disadvantaged and the advantaged alike then join in a bond of hopelessness, endowing a leader with a power they felt they did not possess.

They finally retreated into isolation from the world they knew, and the voice of their leader at the was magnified merging of their own voices. In death they fulfilled their purposes, merging a mass statement. It would make Americans question the nature of [suicide’s]their society, their religions, their politics, and their beliefs.

Each suicide decided to go along that course.

Dreams, Emotions, Evolution, Feelings, HEALING, Inner universe, Lessons, METAPHYSICAL EXERCISES, Metaphysics, Ontology, Physical Life, Thought, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Paranoia and its manifestations

Paranoia is extremely interesting because it shows the ways in which private beliefs can distort events that connect the individual with other people. The events are “distorted.” yet while the paranoid is convinced that those events are valid, this does not change other people’s perception of the same happenings.

Paranoia is most commonly associated with intoxication and withdrawal symptoms from drugs, including alcohol and cocaine. However, paranoia is seen in a wide range of people for many different reasons. Paranoia can be a feature of another mental illness, like anxiety or depression, but most commonly occurs in psychotic disorders like schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder. The more severe the mental illness is, the less likely the said person is going to realize that they are experiencing paranoia instead of threat from people, or even the world.

Alternatively, elderly people suffering from illnesses like dementia can experience paranoia as a symptom of their illness. This is due to the way the brain is altered throughout the illness. Paranoia will usually start with suspicious delusions that the person suffering from Alzheimer’s experiences; they may imagine that their family members are stealing from them, or that someone is following them. As family members, it can make it difficult to interact with the person with Alzheimer’s (you can take a look at these tips on Alzheimer’s Communication if you’re struggling with this) and it can be even more difficult to calm the person down than those suffering from mental illness or drug abuse. Unfortunately, treating paranoia in those with Alzheimer’s is hard due to the alterations of the brain constantly.

Whatever the case, paranoia takes many different forms and impacts many different people. Paranoia does not care for whoever it takes a hold on, and it’s not something that is easily fought off.

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What I want to emphasize here is the paranoid’s misinterpretation of innocuous personal or mass events, and to stress the ways in which physical events can be put together symbolically, so that from them a reality can be created that is almost part physical and part dream.

We must of course interpret events in a personal manner. We create them. Yet there is also a meeting ground of more or less shared physical encounters, a sense plateau that offers firm-enough footing for the agreement of a mass-shared world. With most mental aberrations, we are dealing with people whose private symbols are so heavily thrust over prime sense data that even those data sometimes become almost invisible. These individuals often use the physical world in the way that most people use the dream world, so that for them it is difficult to distinguish a private and a publicly-shared reality.

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Many such people are highly creative and imaginative. Often, however, they have less of a solid foundation than others in dealing with a mass-shared reality, and so they attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or to form a completely private world. I am speaking in general terms now, and in those terms such people are leery of human relationships. Each person forms his or her own reality, and yet that personal reality must also be shared with others, and must be affected by the reality of others.

As creatures dwelling in time and space, our senses provide us with highly specific data, and with a cohesive-enough physical reality. Each person may react to the seasons in a very personal manner, and yet we all share those natural events. They provide a framework for experience. It is up to the conscious mind to interpret sense events as clearly and concisely as possible. This allows for the necessary freedom of action for psychological and physical mobility. We are an imaginative species, and so the physical world is colored, charged, by our own imaginative projections, and powered by the great sweep of the emotions. But when we are confused or upset, it is an excellent idea to return our attention to the natural world as it appears at any given moment — to sense its effect upon us as separate from our own projections.

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We form our own reality. Yet if we are in the Northeast in the wintertime, we had better be experiencing a physical winter, or we are far divorced from primary sense data.

The paranoid has certain other beliefs. Let us take a hypothetical individual — one who is convinced he has a healthy body, and is proud of mental stability. Let us call this friend Paul.

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Paul [for his own reasons] may decide that his body is out to get him and punish him, rather than say, the FBI. He may symbolically pick out an organ or a function, and he will misinterpret many body events in the same way that another may misinterpret mass events. Any public service announcements, so-called, publicizing symptoms connected with his sensitive area, will immediately alarm him. He will consciously and unconsciously focus upon that [art of the body,] anticipating its malfunction. Our friend can indeed alter the reality of his body.

Paul will interpret such body events in a negative fashion, and as threatening, so that some quite normal sensations will serve the same functions as a fear of policemen, for example. If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever. In each case we are dealing with a misinterpretation of basic sense data.

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When I say that a person misinterprets sense data, I mean that the fine balance between mind and matter becomes overstrained in one direction. There are, then, certain events that connect the world. Though when everything’s said and done these events come from outside of the world’s order, nevertheless they appear as constants within it. Their reality is the result of the most precise balancing of forces so that certain mental events appear quite real, and others are peripheral. We have dusk and dawn. If in the middle of the night, and fully awake, we believe it is sunrise in physical terms, and cannot differentiate between our personal reality and the physical one, then that balance is disturbed.

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The paranoid organizes the psychological world about his/her obsession, for such it is, and he/she cuts everything out that does not apply, until all conforms to his/her beliefs. An examination of unprejudiced sense data at any point would at any time bring him/her relief.

Paranoia can be a very serious mental condition, that if untreated, may develop into something that inhibits an individual’s quality of life severely. An individual who is either suffering from this or knows someone who is may seek out help and assistance to possibly treat this. Forms of treatment could be the traditional rote of therapy and a doctor, or it might be through alternative medicines such as CBD gummies and other alternative healing therapies, that might be helpful.

Regradless of what option is chosen as a route for possible treatment, it is advised to seek out the advice of a medical professional like a doctor, so as to get some sound advice and treatment if an individual suffering from paranoia should ever need it in the future.

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